I know it's been a while since my last post on my 11ty blog transition. And furthermore, I recognize that I've actually published the new version of the site without completing the write-up. I promise that I will document more of that process soon.
In the meantime, I wanted to share a little about another project I have worked on, which also uses 11ty. I was looking up someone's list of links, which they had built with something along the lines of LinkTree. As I did that, I thought of two things. First, I wanted to set something like that up for my links, though I didn't particularly like the look of the particular page I was viewing. And second, I wanted to figure out how to do it myself for free, while also not piggybacking off a proprietary platform.
I'd already been working with 11ty on my blog project, and so I knew the basic how-to of getting started with it. I also knew that a link generator is a fantastic use of a static website. The links aren't going to change much, so there's no reason there needs to be something complex like a database behind the scenes.
Introducing 'url-branch'
And so I set out and created what I think is a nifty little link aggregator. I named it "url-branch" because, you know... LinkTree. And I just published a version 1 today! You can find it on my Github.
It should be very straight forward to use, and there's a basic how-to in the README file. Essentially you just modify a couple of JSON files to add the links you want and specify your profile details, and it will take care of the rest.
I'd love for you to check it out, and hopefully you find it useful. If you have things you'd like changed, I'm happy to hear them and can try to accommodate. You can reach out in the Discussions section of the Github repository, or ping me on Bluesky. I'm going to try to get comments up and running on this blog soon, so you will hopefully be able to reply here as well.